No blood-thirsty Vikings pillaged the Ballard Seafood festival. But I valiantly, and artfully, skirted lumbering hoards of urban serfs bearing whiny children in tow. And it was hot. The opaque heat seared the blue sky gray. Bright hot, cranial-throbbing hot.
I've lived in the deep tropics. The kind of place that hits you with the smell of exotic molds, frying coconut oil, and food rubbish braising in heaps in the gutter. So with some authority, I can claim that when it's hot in Seattle, it feels hotter than anywhere on earth. Probably because it's Seattle.
So I developed a strategy of retreat and eat. Along the sunny Market Street corridor of food vendors, make a purchase, and scurry over to the shady sidewalk to eat. Right at the corner, I found Anita's Crepes. Young women poured the crepe batter onto a round griddle top, black and infernally hot like a wheel on Satan's chariot. How I thanked my lucky stars that, within minutes, I would be back in the shade. How did these women do it?
I quickly discovered, in my very hands, my very own smoked salmon crepe, with spinich and tzatziki sauce, a one-dish food orgy. Within the crepe's warm embrace, the sauce and the salmon got down and dirty. The dill in the tzatziki rested comfortably up front. The spinach hid in the background, where it belonged. Damn, this was good.
The crab cakes, from "Crab Cakes and Seafood Specialties" let me down. They were starchy, like a faintly fishy falafel, with middling flecks of crab meat. In their defense, my last crab cake was arguably the best America has to offer. Faidley's Seafood has been crafting crab cakes in Baltimore's Lexington Market since 1886. Faidley's crab cakes are pillows of near-perfection; lump blue crab meat gracefully held together by a light binder. Big as a baseball, no breading or heavy filler stands between the customer and the crab. Next to these, all others are judged unworthy. Most anyways.
After this, I needed a beer in a shady anonymous bar. After all, I came here to experience what Ballard does best.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Aw Shucks!!!
Oysters Rockefeller are definitely off the menu. They're outrageously labor-intensive, hard on the heart (what, with all that butter) and I damned nearly took my hand off preparing them.
In April, I offered my culinary talents, such as they are, to the Graham Hill Elementary School auction. For the silent auction, I submitted a New Orleans Seafood Dinner for eight. This included four courses and wine. After the auction, the woman who bought the dinner and I got to talking. We agreed on four courses for ten, no wine included.
The centerpiece of the meal, if not the main course, was to be Oysters Rockefeller. The name conjures the roaring twenties in the big easy. A bejeweled flapper in a low-cut green velvet dress, a cultured pearl necklace, sipping champagne and contemplating half-shells atop platters of glimmering rock salt. How could you go wrong?
I first tested them at my apartment for my girlfriend and I. We started with 12 medium-sized oysters from Uwajimaya. After scrubbing them clean of sand and marine detritus, I commenced with the shucking.
Even when oysters open up easily, shucking is a messy job. It the end, I have one sopping wet dish towel littered with shell fragments, juice, and snotty oyster tissue And I did it with my bare hands, leaving a few minor nicks on my palms, like salty paper cuts.
After returning to the half-shell, they each earn a dollop of green herb-butter mixture and are tucked onto a bed of rock salt. Then, it's nighty night into a 500 degree oven for 15 minutes until the herbs brown a bit.
The herb-butter mixture is the trade secrets of several New Orleans establishments including Antoine's where the dish was conceived back in 1899. Variations of the recipe abound. Most call for spinach. Antoine's, otherwise mum about their recipe, uses no spinach. Parsley, celery, watercress, sorrel, and arugula are often used in combination, along with several dried herbs. Cayenne or Tabasco deliver a nice kick, but can be omitted. Some use salted butter, others sweet. Breadcrumbs, capers, anchovies, and Worcestershire sauce are all variables. What remains consistent is the use of an anise-flavored liquor, usually Pernot.
I'm fairly satisfied with my blend which I tested before dressing the oysters with it. The spicy greens, anise seed, and Pernot ring with a flavorful cacophony, like jungle birds in an argument. But the salt butter seemed to coax a bitter undertone from the herbs which burned the back of my throat. Would this persist after cooking, or would it redeem itself?
At my first taste as they left the oven, a savory revelation occurred: the salt was perfectly balanced. It shone in rays of green decadence. The salted butter and herbs fused perfectly, and the natural salinity of the oyster had been tempered by the cooking. This created a milder meaty vehicle for the audacious sauce it swam in. I couldn't have asked for a better dish.
Two months later, preparing a practice dinner for my family and friends, I wasn't sure it was worth it. With 45 minutes left on the clock, a salad half made, Creole court bullion unattended on the stove, I had a long way to go.
Two paper grocery bags were each packed full of the largest oysters I had ever wrestled with, had ever seen. They were South Pacific man eaters that divers get their leg stuck in while harvesting pearls. Sand, grit, and seaweed coated each of them. After scrubbing a dozen of them passably clean, I needed a rest.
By the time I finished, I was salty, wet, exhausted, and ready to feed them to the gulls. Shucking them only discouraged me further. I had assumed that larger oysters would be easier to open. Unfortunately, their beefy abductor muscles held closed for dear life. It was like trying to pry open a bear trap with a butter knife.
I had always opened oysters from the back hinge and worked my way forward. My Dad instructed me to first chip the edge midway up the shell near the abductor. Then I could work the knife around the top and then pry them open from the hinge. This worked slightly better. But still, bits of shell flew around the kitchen, as if I was sandblasting a coral reef. Stinky Clamato-like water saturated two more hand towels. In my impatience, I opened some of the stubborn ones with a sheet rock knife. This had my mother more than a little concerned.
It was inevitable. Haste and fatigue had caught up with me. The oyster knife slipped from the shell and found its way deep into my left hand, just above the thumb. I peered into the hole and, for a moment, it was only a hole. It reminded me of a baby's mouth, open in stunned surprise, just before he starts to cry. But my hand didn't cry, it just started to bleed.
I ran to the bathroom and thrust my hand into the running sink, watching the blood pulse and tint the water. It was time to delegate the rest of the dinner. I had shucked my last oyster for the night.
Somehow, all the oysters made it in the oven, and out. The salad completed, the fish poached in a red Creole sauce, the table set, the wine poured, the guests served. And somehow, as I write these words, I remember that first time I made them in my apartment. The delicately chewy texture. Sopping up the herb-infused butter with French bread. I would love to share THAT Oysters Rockefeller, THAT experience, with the ten people I'll be cooking for. So maybe they're back on the menu. That's a big maybe, mind you. And not without gloves.
In April, I offered my culinary talents, such as they are, to the Graham Hill Elementary School auction. For the silent auction, I submitted a New Orleans Seafood Dinner for eight. This included four courses and wine. After the auction, the woman who bought the dinner and I got to talking. We agreed on four courses for ten, no wine included.
The centerpiece of the meal, if not the main course, was to be Oysters Rockefeller. The name conjures the roaring twenties in the big easy. A bejeweled flapper in a low-cut green velvet dress, a cultured pearl necklace, sipping champagne and contemplating half-shells atop platters of glimmering rock salt. How could you go wrong?
I first tested them at my apartment for my girlfriend and I. We started with 12 medium-sized oysters from Uwajimaya. After scrubbing them clean of sand and marine detritus, I commenced with the shucking.
Even when oysters open up easily, shucking is a messy job. It the end, I have one sopping wet dish towel littered with shell fragments, juice, and snotty oyster tissue And I did it with my bare hands, leaving a few minor nicks on my palms, like salty paper cuts.
After returning to the half-shell, they each earn a dollop of green herb-butter mixture and are tucked onto a bed of rock salt. Then, it's nighty night into a 500 degree oven for 15 minutes until the herbs brown a bit.
The herb-butter mixture is the trade secrets of several New Orleans establishments including Antoine's where the dish was conceived back in 1899. Variations of the recipe abound. Most call for spinach. Antoine's, otherwise mum about their recipe, uses no spinach. Parsley, celery, watercress, sorrel, and arugula are often used in combination, along with several dried herbs. Cayenne or Tabasco deliver a nice kick, but can be omitted. Some use salted butter, others sweet. Breadcrumbs, capers, anchovies, and Worcestershire sauce are all variables. What remains consistent is the use of an anise-flavored liquor, usually Pernot.
I'm fairly satisfied with my blend which I tested before dressing the oysters with it. The spicy greens, anise seed, and Pernot ring with a flavorful cacophony, like jungle birds in an argument. But the salt butter seemed to coax a bitter undertone from the herbs which burned the back of my throat. Would this persist after cooking, or would it redeem itself?
At my first taste as they left the oven, a savory revelation occurred: the salt was perfectly balanced. It shone in rays of green decadence. The salted butter and herbs fused perfectly, and the natural salinity of the oyster had been tempered by the cooking. This created a milder meaty vehicle for the audacious sauce it swam in. I couldn't have asked for a better dish.
Two months later, preparing a practice dinner for my family and friends, I wasn't sure it was worth it. With 45 minutes left on the clock, a salad half made, Creole court bullion unattended on the stove, I had a long way to go.
Two paper grocery bags were each packed full of the largest oysters I had ever wrestled with, had ever seen. They were South Pacific man eaters that divers get their leg stuck in while harvesting pearls. Sand, grit, and seaweed coated each of them. After scrubbing a dozen of them passably clean, I needed a rest.
By the time I finished, I was salty, wet, exhausted, and ready to feed them to the gulls. Shucking them only discouraged me further. I had assumed that larger oysters would be easier to open. Unfortunately, their beefy abductor muscles held closed for dear life. It was like trying to pry open a bear trap with a butter knife.
I had always opened oysters from the back hinge and worked my way forward. My Dad instructed me to first chip the edge midway up the shell near the abductor. Then I could work the knife around the top and then pry them open from the hinge. This worked slightly better. But still, bits of shell flew around the kitchen, as if I was sandblasting a coral reef. Stinky Clamato-like water saturated two more hand towels. In my impatience, I opened some of the stubborn ones with a sheet rock knife. This had my mother more than a little concerned.
It was inevitable. Haste and fatigue had caught up with me. The oyster knife slipped from the shell and found its way deep into my left hand, just above the thumb. I peered into the hole and, for a moment, it was only a hole. It reminded me of a baby's mouth, open in stunned surprise, just before he starts to cry. But my hand didn't cry, it just started to bleed.
I ran to the bathroom and thrust my hand into the running sink, watching the blood pulse and tint the water. It was time to delegate the rest of the dinner. I had shucked my last oyster for the night.
Somehow, all the oysters made it in the oven, and out. The salad completed, the fish poached in a red Creole sauce, the table set, the wine poured, the guests served. And somehow, as I write these words, I remember that first time I made them in my apartment. The delicately chewy texture. Sopping up the herb-infused butter with French bread. I would love to share THAT Oysters Rockefeller, THAT experience, with the ten people I'll be cooking for. So maybe they're back on the menu. That's a big maybe, mind you. And not without gloves.
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